Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The Rule Breaker

I chose this topic as I know how people can get hung up on them there pesky 'rules' of creative writing (though 'guidelines' might be a better word). It's easy to internalise them to the extent that they stifle any creative spark that's struggling to push its way out from your clogged-up brain. Just as it's about to emerge, blinking in the sunlight, it's clobbered by someone wielding a big stick and shouting, 'You can't do that!' And that has to be a Bad Thing to anyone who loves shaping words into stories and doing something different and fresh.

On the other hand, I've edited countless MSes that don't work because the POV switches round so much the reader gets dizzy, or where it's impossible to work out where you are in the timeline.

So what I want to do in the workshop is to define what those so-called rules are and why they matter; to demonstrate what the consequences are of breaking them and stress that an author neeeds a good reason to do it ... and then provide the tools that will enable people to go ahead and do just that.

As one of the lovely people on WordCloud has said, it's like teaching a child to cross the road safely. It's best to cross at the lights, but as you grow up, you realise you can step out elsewhere, as long as you know what you're doing and do so with care.

So far, I've come up with POV switches, sticking to a linear chronological structure, not switching tenses or between first and third person, prologues and a few others.

9 comments:

I need to take your workshop! I get hung up on narrative voice when it's 3rd person. I keep asking so who is this person who's talking? Maybe I read too much Anthony Trollope, but I keep thinking the narrator needs to be a separate person who's sitting across from me telling me a story....That's why I always seem to write in 1st person these days.

Sue - you should know by now that I love your writing. But you're right in that you do have to think about whose voice the story is being told in and whose eyes we see the action through, even when writing in the third person.

Queenie - another fab writer! Yes again. Show not tell has been duly added to the list already. It's a good 'un - in a full length novel it's not possible to show everything. The trick is in deciding which things need to be shown and which can be told.

It seems a lot of people have been tackling this lately! I'm not one for rules (as you've seen) but If I were going to be tackling this subject it would be more couched in what to do than not to do. That is, I think we should be writing consciously -choosing the POV because of what we want it to do, likewise the tense, likewise the palette of colours we use - everything with a purpose. So the best we can do is educate ourselves on what effect certain ways of writing have on the reader so we build the resources available to us.

I was taught never to start a piece of fiction with direct speech, as there is, 99% of the time, a more efficient way to do it. I was taught to take care with flashbacks, keep them to a minimum, and if possible avoid any direct speech in said flashbacks. And certainly, to have grammatically correct sentences...

My novel "The Coward's Tale' starts with a line of dialogue.It is written in future, conditional and present tenses. Apart from the flashbacks...There are long long flashbacks related in direct speech.